A popular marketing technique to sell products is to provide free samples to potential customers in order to entice the customers to buy the product. The free sample can be provided to the customer by an employee of, for example, a grocery store during regular working hours while the customer is otherwise shopping for other products. The store employee can then sell the customer the product by pointing the customer to the area of the store where that product is sold, typically close to where the free sample is provided. This marketing tool is especially popular for products that have only recently entered the market or where potential customers are not likely to have sampled the product through conventional means.
The free sample dispensing process discussed above requires a store employee to be stationed next to the free samples and to deliver the free samples to the customers. This added cost can further increase the price of marketing a new product and delivering the free sample to the customer. Thus, a need exists for an automated free sample dispensing system.
Product delivery systems are a popular form of dispensing consumables to a buyer. For example, soda machines provide an automated way to sell a container of soda to a customer by accepting the customer's money and dispensing the soda in a dispensing area, typically below the area where the buyer inserts their money. To load the machine with consumer goods, soda machines require a serviceman to insert the sodas seriatim into a pathway from which the sodas are dispensed to the customer. Similarly, food vending machines typically involve a rotating spiral, where food products are disposed between the coils of the spiral in a serial manner and dispensed by rotation of the spiral.
The above system for dispensing consumer products include the drawback that products must be dispensed seriatim, or one-by-one within the product delivery system, thus necessitating the costly and time consuming process of loading the product in the dispenser. A serviceman must individually load each can of soda, or, each food product into the machine, in order for the machine to work properly and dispense the product effectively.
Also, the above methods of dispensing a product are typically tailored to a product of a known size and shape (e.g., the soda example above). The known product dispensing methods do not adapt themselves to products of varying shapes and sizes that are bulk loaded into a receiving bin, e.g. a hopper.
The above product dispensation methods also require distribution devices with several pinch points. These pinch points can cause significant damage to a product when the product is dispensed through the conventional systems.